YorkshireRifles Indie Games

Monday, 2 March 2009

I've been busy to the extent that February passed without a single blog post. Busy sorting out a host of chaps - and not the sort of chaps exotic dancers may wear either, but manly chaps - and no, not male exotic dancers, although it does feature men in uniform.

Officer Dibble looking a lot less like a two-tone blue blob

Having never actually done anything like this before, it was all a bit of an unknown quantity - but having said that I'm new to almost every part of game design beyond BSP level design and scripting gameplay events (player hits trigger = bad guys spawn/action ensues/badgers attack)

Included in the top left of each series of images is the original, raw version of the model type, as used in my old Dubious Demo way back in April'08.

Generic Bald Space Marine Free Zone - Moustaches and Mullets - the sign of a man so manly he drinks Old Spice and sweats Brut

Being a great believer in Keep It Simple Stoopid I based as much as possible off each other to reuse things like normal maps and share the same basic blueprints. There are 4 base face types, 3 base jacket types, 5 base hat types on a single image file, everyone wears the same gloves and everyone loves denim and hiking boots.

I was also concerned with the horror of stereotype which is the crime against decency and intellect better known as the generic bald space marine that plagues 3A gaming. So everyone has hair and plenty of it, both on head and face. Everyone wears a hat. More game characters should have lush and bountiful moustaches and bad teeth.

Heroes may occaisonally get stuck in a lift armed only with a string vest, but no-one ever puts a cheap suit with a bretton cap.

That's about it on the character modelling front for the time being. There's still a bit of tweaking required when the models pose, a few animations to sort out (though I did alter/faff with some in the last month), and some other related work yet to do. But I'm planning on sorting that out at a later date as I don't want to find something else that needs fixing later on and then have to refaff with it all again. So it'll get finished in one fell swoop.

Next up is back to level design and a specific test. Now that I have pretty much all of the required textures/maps/models/assests/etc for an environment prebuilt, I need to see how fast I can "knock up" a complete level. Also, prior to this but possible at the same time, I have an idea to try on building a BSP in a slightly different manner to my first level.